The year end is coming, before we move on to the new year, it’s high time for all of us to do a review for the year. To me, doing this annual review is like getting a report card. It’s no different with my annual review – except these results aren’t for my studies – they’re bigger. They’re for my life.
So why is it important to do a year end review? There are 4 simple reasons: 年终总结为什么这么重要?有这样四个简单的理由:
1. Draw lessons from the year 从一年中吸取经验教训
What have you experienced this year? What have you learned from them? With every experience we face, there are important things to learn. We can either let these incidencespass us by, or we can stop to understand, internalizethem, and draw lessons from them. Life is your school, and the lessons are dressed up as your everyday incidences. You don’t want to be living year after year without learning from your experiences. That’s just sleepwalking your life away.
There are a lot of lessons which I learn every year. Looking back at my review for 2007, one of the biggest lessons I learned is that our reactions to life’s situations is a choice, and it’s up to how we make out of situations we encounter. This realization came after a highly intenseperiod at my job. At that time I was already a positive person, but the situation was so out of control that it really made me negative. It was after a short period of feeling miserable that I realized that the reality was such and it was up to me to make the best out of it. I could either sit and bitch about it which would do absolutely nothing to change the situation, or I could take action and make the best out of it. This small shift in my mindsetcreated a big shift in my reality – it made me a lot more proactiveand solution-oriented. It made me realize that many of us generate unnecessary baggage with negative situations in life, and it’s all about taking action to create the lives that we want. Happiness is truly a choice.
Because I would write down lessons I learned each time (in my life handbook), I could then build upon my learnings. Rather than deja vuing through life situations, every time I would think about how I could apply what I had learned earlier and how I could do something different. As a result, I kept moving forward in my growth.